


The Night is Long, The Beads of Time Pass Slow

by StarkAstarte



Series: Merthurmania! [1]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Heartache, Honesty, Longing, Love, M/M, Slash, Vague Time-Period
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-19
Updated: 2014-03-19
Packaged: 2018-01-16 08:51:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,488
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1339423
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarkAstarte/pseuds/StarkAstarte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Merlin longs for Arthur. Arthur longs for Merlin. Gwen has noticed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Night is Long, The Beads of Time Pass Slow

**Author's Note:**

  * For [OwnThyself](https://archiveofourown.org/users/OwnThyself/gifts).



“Can you not see how miserable he is, Arthur?” Gwen’s eyes are soft, deep as costly velvet cloth. She places her hand on the crook of his elbow, steering  him firmly toward the window. He gazes impatiently through mullioned panes out onto the courtyard below. No one else stirs in the early dawn glow. Just the familiar stick-figure festooned in rumpled, flapping homespun clothing. Shabby leather coat and worn-at-the-heels many-times-mended boots. A faded blue tunic clumsily laced. A splash of vermillion like a gout of blood at his throat. He is too thin. His hair wants cutting. Arthur watches his friend. The shadows slanting across the jut of nose and cheekbones throw the face he has known longest and best, it seems, of all his knights, into stark relief.

 _But Merlin isn’t a knight_ , he reminds himself.

Too clumsy. Gangly. A lean stick of a man made from the leftover kindling of the boy he must have been once. A raggedy lad in blue homespun, a streak of red like the banner of Camelot flapping at his throat. He is still so much a boy, sometimes, that Arthur forgets the years hold any sway over his servant. He seems ageless as Albion herself.

Sensing the king's gaze, the figure stiffens, turns. Lifts his face to the window as if toward the sun itself. Arthur’s heart lurches painfully in his chest, like a loyal hound leaping towards its beloved companion. A wide grin splits the gaunt face below, cleaving it clean through the middle. Merlin raises a scrawny arm and waves, his fingers the only elegant part of him. Or so Arthur tells himself.

The king nods austerely, turning from the window. The tight fist that has been churning his guts unclenches itself. He relaxes, only slightly. “Nonsense,” he says, firmly. He directs the queen’s gaze toward the ridiculously gesticulating figure. “See?” he says, shrugging Gwen’s hand away. “He’s fine. He’s an idiot, in fact. I told him to saddle the grey, and he’s got the black out instead. The fool will break his neck, or mine.”

But Gwen’s frown remains intact. “He’s not an idiot, Arthur. Nor am I. Do you think I don’t know? He loves you. He has always loved you. And what is more, you love him.”

Arthur stares at her, his mouth coming open. Words fail to form themselves correctly. His ears roar with the cacophony of his blood. “Gwen, I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, or what ridiculous gossip your ladies-in-waiting have been feeding you, but I assure you I feel nothing whatever--”

Gwen lifts a silencing hand. “Please don’t make a fool of me or of yourself, Arthur. Do you think I did not notice you sneaking off to the battlements every night and Merlin scampering after you at a discreet five-minute interval all those years ago when I was still Morgana’s maid?”

Arthur sets his mouth. “Tactics.” he says evenly. “Astronomical mapping. For campaigns. I was training him to navigate by the stars.”

Gwen raises a perfectly sculpted eyebrow. “Nonsense.” she enunciates. A smile steals across her face, and she looks again like the impish young girl who had been Morgana’s confidante and comfort in the long nightmare hours before dawn. “Love. And sex. Quite a lot of it, I suspect.”

Arthur’s face floods with colour, but when he parts his lips to protest, Gwen’s cool fingers close them again. “After all, I should know. How do you think Morgana and I wiled away the hours until morning when she was plagued with visions and terrors?”

Arthur splutters. He has never been more astonished in his life.

Not even the first time his lips had closed over Merlin’s, and the young servant slipped his warm, wet [and infinitely talented] tongue into Arthur’s mouth. He shuts his eyes, willing the vision to recede back into the past, where all such bitter delights belong. “Gwen, I don’t think we should be one of those couples who tell one another _everything_ ,” he says quietly. “I mean, clearly we _aren’t_ that sort of couple, given the revelation you have just made.”

Gwen laughs, rolling her eyes in that inimitable way she has. She takes his hot face between her smooth palms and looks into his troubled eyes. “My love,” she says calmly and slowly and with infinite patience, as if speaking to a half-wit. “Don’t be such an insufferable prude.”

Arthur shakes her off, his eyes bulging, his chest puffing out to full capacity. “What! I’m _not_!”

“Fine. Prove it. Admit you’ve been in love with Merlin for years, even if you no longer acted upon it after we were married.”

“You’re being ridiculous,” Arthur huffs. “I will admit no such thing, because it isn’t true.”

Gwen’s expression grows grave. Her eyes cease their sparkling. “Oh, Arthur. How much pain this must have caused you over the years, denying what you truly feel.”

“Gwen,” Arthur takes her by the shoulders. “Guini _vere_. You must stop this. I love you. I love _you_. Do you think I would have married you if I didn’t?”

“Of course not, Arthur. But people are much more complex than the ballads would have us believe. One man. One woman. Eternal la-di-da. I’ve loved before you, and you loved before me. Can you not  at least admit that?”

Arthur looks at her, stern, his eyes like flint. “You are the only woman I have ever wanted.”

Gwen nods solemnly. “I know. But we are not talking of another woman. We are talking of Merlin. A man who has been as much a husband to you as I have been a wife. Perhaps more so. Perhaps _much_ more. And you are slowly, surely, and mercilessly breaking his heart. Don’t let that sweet grin fool you, Arthur. It doesn’t fool me. Not for a moment.”

Her fingers slide lingeringly down the length of his arm as she leaves him in the wake of her dizzying swirl of silk skirts and sweet-smelling perfume. "I lost Morgana," Gwen murmurs, her soft voice growing faint as she trails down the stairs. "You needn't suffer the same fate."

Arthur closes his eyes, leaning his hot cheek against the cool window. He presses his lips against the dappled glass. Remembering.

Down below, Merlin droops his head against the withers of the oddly calm, completely enchanted devil of a horse Arthur hopes will soon throw him to the ground, dashing him to pieces on the cobblestones. No more king. No more foolish, aching heart. The stallion twists around to huff hot, concerned breath over Merlin’s face, ruffling his ridiculous [beautiful, shiny] nest of hair. It nuzzles insistently at the crook of his stupid, spindly [elegant, supple] neck, worrying at the knot in the bright red fabric until the ribbon of crimson is loose, blowing in the breeze. Blowing back to Camelot.

Arthur lays his palm against the cool glass. His breath comes in short, shallow swallows. Merlin. Oh, gods. _Merlin_.

***

 _This can’t go on._ We _can’t. I love Gwenivere. I’m going to marry her._

_Do you think I’m stupid? Do you think I don’t know that? I knew it before you did, you insufferable prat. Get out. Get out, and leave me alone!_

_Merlin._

_Go. Just. Go._

_An odd explosion sounds inside of Merlin’s chamber as Arthur is leaving. A strange flash of light he pretends not to see. The sound of a muffled sob he quickly tells himself he didn’t hear._

_At the wedding feast next eventide Merlin is grinning like the village fool. He dances himself dizzy, drinks himself sick. When Gwaine carts him off to bed slung over his powerful shoulder, one hand gripping him fondly by the [achingly shapely] arse, Arthur is nearly overcome with a nameless, formless rage. Only the expression on Gwen’s face, of total love, complete trust, calms him. The wine certainly doesn’t hurt, either._

_He closes a door that night, after he has lain tenderly with Gwen, and she is sleeping. He shuts the door at the top of the winding staircase closest to his chambers leading to the battlements overlooking the city. He locks it, and has the key melted down the day after his wedding. He tells a timid pageboy to fling the lump of metal into the deepest depths of the Lake of Avalon, and never to tell anyone what he has done, on pain of banishment._

_Arthur never allows himself think on the door for a single moment again._

_Dreams, however. Dreams where Merlin are concerned are another matter._

***

“Tell me you love me,” Dream-Merlin says, his lips forming a plush, kiss-bitten _moue_ Arthur longs to suckle. “Tell me you’ve always loved me.”

“I’ve always loved you,” Arthur says, pressing his lips against the deep dimple in his lover’s cheek. They have been naked in the summer heat for hours. For years. “Always and always and always, from Time’s beginning to its end.”

“Time will never end,” Merlin murmurs. “Not for us. You are the king who loves me and cannot die.”

Arthur wakes gasping, runnels of sweat streaming down his chest. The bed-linens tangle his limbs unbearably. He tears himself free. He sinks slowly to the floor, laying the length of his feverish body along the cool stones.

He longs to run for a great distance without taking a single breath. He wants to plunge into the coldest, deepest water he can find, and sleep for the rest of time. Until inhuman voices wake him. Or just one voice. One surprisingly melodic, sonorous voice belying the spindly instrument it pours out of in an endless, irritating [captivating] crescendo.

It can’t go on like this. It can’t. Gwen’s intervention has rekindled a fire in him he has been quenching for so long. It’s too late now. It’s become a wildfire. He must outrun it. He must.

Arthur springs to his feet. He slips soundlessly out of the door. His feet pound out an undetectable rhythm on the cool night-stones of the Citadel. He must climb up. He must go as high as he can reach. He wants to look down on Camelot, on the necklace of lights adorning the great and terrible night before him.

He goes the quickest way he knows.

_Merlin. Meet me on the battlements. Quarter past midnight._

_Why, Sire?_

_Never mind,_ Mer _l_ _in. I’ll show you when you get there._

 _Is it a surprise? It_ was _my birthday last week, you know._

_Shut up, Merlin. Just be there. Don’t be late._

The staircase winds on longer than Arthur remembers it doing, all those years back. But even then it felt endless. _He has been as much a husband to you as I have been a wife. Perhaps more so._ Much _more so...._ Arthur’s feet ache with the impact, his lungs compressing and expanding like a mighty pair of bellows. It doesn’t seem odd to him that the door comes open against his shoulder with no resistance. Not even a screel of rusted hinges. It opens like a mouth preparing to sing. The air rushes around him, cooling his sweat in an instant. He shivers, standing on the battlements in nothing but his breeches. The hair plastered to his brow begins to lift and wave about like a golden pennant in the warm breeze of an August melee.

He crosses his arms reflexively over his chest, rubbing his shoulders vigorously against the wind. It isn’t August, after all. The Solstice isn’t far off. He smells the exciting, faintly bitter astringency of snow on the air. He shivers more violently, and rubs harder, dancing a little on his bare tiptoes. He doesn’t want to go back inside just yet. He doesn’t want to go back inside the castle, ever.

He startles at the feel of a pair of hands sliding beneath his. Adrenaline surges through him, a searing tide not unlike battle-sickness, the inevitable desire that comes upon a warrior after a kill. The feeling that he must lay down with someone or die overtakes him. Only one person does this to him without drawing blood. Only one person on earth turns him into a blooded warrior with just one caress.

“Here,” the voice he has been longing to hear murmurs behind him. “Let me do that, Sire. You always were a bit of a girl about the cold.” Warm hands, strong and tensile, slide up and down his bare flesh. Arthur is always surprised at their strength, the clever dexterity that has wrung pleasure out of him in ways no other hands have, not even his own. He shus his eyes, leaning back against the washboard chest. Long arms like wiry saplings enclose him. Rough linen upbraids Arthur’s goose-flesh-spangled skin.

He smells the familiar herbaceous scent of Merlin’s skin, an odour peculiar to him and peculiar in general--like the back of an apothecary’s cabinet mixed with all the sweet grasses of summer. An underpinning of nervous sweat lends a deliciously equine note. No one smells like Merlin. No one. Arthur’s senses spring to life. Senses he thought drowned and dead years ago set his heart galloping in his chest. He can smell his own sweat, and it mingles with the fragrance of valerian and vetiver as if perfecting a perfume as delicate and ageless as the stones on which they stand.

“Is it my imagination, _Mer_ lin, or did I not have this door sealed and the key melted down years ago?”

Merlin huffs a laugh into Arthur’s ear. His warm breath feels so like a kiss that Arthur’s knees nearly give out. He closes his eyes tighter, leaning back further as he tilts his face up to the stars.

“Did you, Sire? Odd, I hadn’t noticed.”

“Well, that’s because you are _the_ worst, _most_ useless toad of a servant it has ever been my misfortune to employ.”

“Well, maybe _that’s_ because _you_ are a  complete prat. A Royal one--and must take what you can get.”

Arthur turns in Merlin’s arms, which do not break apart. Rather, they grip him closer, until the two of them are fused at the midsection. He slides his hands up under Merlin’s tunic, running his fingers over the smooth and supple flesh enveloping the thinner man’s appallingly convex rib cage. “What’s the matter, _Mer_ lin? Been pining after me too much to bother, I don’t know, _eating_?”

Merlin smiles softly, his deep-set crescent-moon eyes gazing directly into the flinty blue of Arthur’s. “Yes,” he says, simply. As he always says anything that matters. “What did you expect? I love you.”

“Shut up,” Arthur says hoarsely, pressing his lover back against the battlements. “Shut up, Merlin, and kiss me.”

“Yes, Sire. Oh, gods. Yes.”

King and Sorcerer fall together in a tangle of limbs. Beneath them, Camelot shines in the darkness, a necklet of eternal light. The city that remembers, and cannot fall. _This,_ it says, preening. _This is what ballads are made of._

****  



End file.
